


Algebra

by kangeiko



Category: Alias
Genre: Backstory, Gen, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-06-11
Updated: 2006-06-11
Packaged: 2017-10-07 14:54:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 606
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/66229
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kangeiko/pseuds/kangeiko
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jack has always been good with numbers.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Algebra

Jack's love of numbers had sprung out of an appreciation of their neatness, rather than of their power. He had always been good with them, as a child, as a teenager, as an adult: multiplication, division, calculus, _and convert it to radians_... As a teenager, he had taken comfort in the familiarity of his hand moving across the page, numbers spilling out of his pen in neat rows and columns. Math was a pristine discipline in his mind, one that he had found immensely appealing after the endless moves from school to school his father's job had demanded.

It was a matter of necessity and convenience, really: shipped across the country like so much cattle and forced to start a new school almost every semester, Jack had never had much idea what time period or country his new History class would be studying, or what book his English class were reading. He had almost become accustomed to the crushing humiliation of _not knowing_, of spending his first few precious weekends catching up on work.

But Math. . . Math class was the one lesson that Jack had never had to worry about, no matter where he went. Aged eight and three-quarters, he had explained his reasoning to his bemused mother: "math is the same whatever state you're in." Not like English, which had an apparently endless supply of age-appropriate books. Not History, which evidently had countless battles and redcoats to get through before he'd Know It Properly. Not geography, that had city after city and country after country, and none of them were the same.

Math was different.

When Jack had finally allowed letters to intrude on his ink-and-paper world, it had been a manageable transition.

Q3.a

_x_ \+ _y_ = 8,   
where _x_ = _z_ \- 16   
and _y_ = 7_z_

Therefore, _z_ = . . . . . ?

And, later –

"Players A and B are engaged in a coin-matching game. Each shows a coin as either heads or tails. If the coins match, B pays A $1. If they differ, A pays B $1. Use a payoff matrix to find out whether this game contains a Nash equilibrium."

And, much to his surprise, he turned out to be good at that too.

_Using either an intuitive analysis or a mathematical presentation, discuss how the Bayesian-Nash equilibrium in the conflict diamonds auction (Example 3.4) would be altered if the assumed distribution of valuations was not uniform over the interval [0,1], but instead was characterized by a symmetric, peaked distribution. Would you expect higher bids in the two-bidder auction than in the case of uniform distributions?_

Numbers had always come easily to him; now, letters were yielding the same pristine moments of aesthetic appreciation.

Jack – a little too young, a little too quiet and a little too trustful – was twenty-three years old and content.

The next year, a nice young woman approached him with a pink-and-green ice lolly between her red lips and a gun in her purse. (He remembers that she swung her hips while walking quite steadily on three-inch platform heels.) She said a great many things about honour, and loyalty, and a room where he could sit with an endless supply of chalk and work through matrices until he was filled with them.

"They probably won't ask you to try for field agent status," the girl said dismissively. "It's perfectly safe." She sucked on the ice lolly, staining her lips with it.

_Games and theory_, Jack thought, filled with a strange mixture of professional pride and patriotic humility. He couldn't quite look away from the girl's glossed mouth, smeared with pink melted ice. _That doesn't sound so bad as a job._

*

fin


End file.
